Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions provide tools and capabilities needed to create and maintain a clear picture of customers, from first contact through purchase and post-sales. For complex organizations, a CRM system may provide features and capabilities to help improve the way sales, marketing, and/or customer service organizations target new customers, manage marketing campaigns, and drive sales activities. CRM systems may include many components, hardware and software, utilized individually or in a shared manner by users internal or external to the organization.
CRM systems are an example of computing systems where data associated with entities such as persons, organizations, accounts, and similar ones are maintained for various purposes. Some of the information collected and maintained by CRM applications may also be collected by other common applications such as email, contact, and/or scheduling applications (for example, Outlook® by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.). When users have similar information maintained by two or more applications, a logical action is to synchronize the information in order to enhance efficiency and accuracy. While some applications are capable of synchronizing maintained information, conventional synchronization approaches are relatively unreliable, resource-expensive, and cannot take full advantage of enhanced capabilities such as delegation or search.